There exists a technology for recognizing characters handwritten on a touch panel of, for example, a terminal, and recognizing words and sentences based on the recognized characters. In this technology, to recognize words and sentences, it is important to distinguish a border between characters from a “space” intentionally provided between characters (or words).
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 09-500473 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 06-266899, for example, disclose a technology where a “space” between characters is identified based on a distance between character recognition frames of recognized characters.